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Bill Gates' Climate-Oriented Venture Fund Will Now Also Invest in Climate Adaptation (technologyreview.com) 40

Posted by EditorDavid from the temperature's-rising dept.
Bill Gates's climate-oriented venture fund "is plowing more money into climate adaptation," reports MIT Technology Review: To date, the fund has focused on "climate mitigation," which largely concentrates on driving down climate pollution. Climate adaptation refers to developing ways of bolstering protections against the dangers of climate change, rather than just preventing it.

The firm's new focus will include ways to help farmers and communities grapple with increasingly common or severe droughts [possibly through advanced desalination technology or systems that pull moisture out of the air], and helping crops remain productive as the world becomes hotter, wetter, or drier; potentially through indoor farming and genetic alteration. Strengthening the infrastructure of global ports, which face growing threats from sea-level rise and increasingly powerful storms, will also be investigated.
"Investment opportunities there could include dynamic mooring systems that automatically respond to storm surges, cranes that can operate safely in hotter and harsher conditions, and ships that are more rugged," said Eric Toone, technical lead for Breakthrough Energy Ventures' investment committee, in an interview with MIT Technology Review.

"Mitigation's just not going to get us there fast enough, and suffering is unacceptable...." Toone says. "So while our focus will continue to be on mitigation, we will expand our scope to include adaptation."
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Bill Gates' Climate-Oriented Venture Fund Will Now Also Invest in Climate Adaptation More

Bill Gates' Climate-Oriented Venture Fund Will Now Also Invest in Climate Adaptation

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  • Get out of your cars and on your bikes, you fat bastards.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      At this time, it is pretty much the only thing left that can be done. What a complete and utter failure.

    • This is what should have been done from the beginning. Conservatives have this business strategy, where they wait for liberals to try risky new things, and when they succeed they move in and try to buy things out and take over. Preparing the whole society for an uninhabitable planet is in order, it involves all this tech, all this underground living, and it all has to be done sustainably. If liberals prepared to win and survive, conservatives would be trying to emulate all of it, to own the companies that m

      • Who the fuck paid you to write this absolute and detestable garbage? Liberals are somehow the risk-takers and conservatives are there to glom onto it? You're fucking high and living in an alternate reality you stupid fuck.

  • He should tell tech companies (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Sunday October 23, 2022 @06:52AM (#62990233)
    He once ran one, to stop creating unnecessary e-waste that uses valuble resources by the stopping of security updates on older cpus. I recently found one of my old laptops that is 20 years old and still runs, but can't be used usefully because it is 32 bit, doesn't have sse2 and only has an 8gb hard drive. Android phones are e-waste as soon as they leave the factory, and Microsoft abandoned millipns of Windows phones.

    • Can't be done. The tail is too long. Make old stuff supported forever and every company that lasts long enough will have its resources eventually consumed doing only that. Eventually, periodic dissolution and restarting of companies would become normal as they try to get away from that boat anchor.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Swervin ( 836962 )
        They could just get out of the way and stop putting up active road blocks to people fixing and updating their own stuff. Smart phones have been a huge disappointment compared to semi-standardized desktop computer hardware in that respect.

  • Choo choo! All board SnowPiercer now! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    As Bill's idea of climate adaption also includes all kinds of sinister plans to alter the atmosphere.

    • Of course you wouldn't wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn't belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot.
      A hat belongs on your head. Bill Gates is a hat. You are a shoe.
      Bill Gates belong on the head. You belong on the foot. Yes? So it is.

  • Quite necessary (Score:3)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Sunday October 23, 2022 @08:38AM (#62990403) Journal

    Any plan that starts with "we'll force everyone to be perfect and give up stuff" is doomed to failure.

    It will take technological measures to stop global warming, and cope with its effects. If they want to call it "climate mitigation" and "climate adaptation", fine.

    That, at least, has a chance of working, while guys who build mansions while yelling at other people for wanting mere houses, does not.

    • Yeah. Let us take advice from a billionaire who owns multiple mansions and yachts on a plan and how we should live our lives. As soon as Gore and Gates jumped on the climate change train I knew it was a scam. Why you, a middle class person, goes along with this climate change nonsense is beyond me. It is not going to end well for you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jzanu ( 668651 )
      The myths on which your comment is based are the problem. They are false distortions of the beliefs of those accepting the reality of climate change, who have always focused on dealing with it as the physical reality. Mitigation and adaptation have always meant a different development, not no development. Sure that threatens those with power who depend on exactly the development done so far, but that is what caused the problem to begin with.
  • The problem with 'follow the science' is that science follows the money. It's just more in your face here than usual.

    Nobody is able to question the narrative when there's so much money flowing into one side of the scientific debate. My company is getting on the EV charge point installation bandwagon despite it being a fraud, and I'm fine with that because it pays my salary. I cut and paste the environmental slogans into my proposal documents and I reuse paragraphs I find online from corporate responsibil

  • So they have given up? (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday October 23, 2022 @11:04AM (#62990689)

    Well, it looks like we are truly on the way to 3..4C this century. No amount of "adaption" will prevent a few billion deaths from that. There is just no way to do it. We may be able to preserve civilization if we really focus on that though, so I applaud the effort.

    • Also, the hundreds of millions of people who have the means to flee areas that are no longer habitable are going to make life much more difficult for those living in places which still are.

      It's hard to see any way this wouldn't turn into countless "might makes right" scenarios, where rule of law collapses because food scarcity has become the #1 issue almost everywhere. We think we have supply chain problems and immigration worries now...

      --
      We will soon have the option to harvest our farts, so we ca

  • I hope more people follow that trajectory. I think avoiding these self-defined thresholds is a fool's errand. I want know we have a plan b, even c,d, and e as well.

    Don't tell me we must do X. I've been hearing that too long. Tell me that if we do Y, it'll help when the shit goes down. Because this is indeed going down.

  • put a dash in something to ramp up its lameness, or not... Hmm what are the rules again for whem its proper to toss in a "-"? i like "_" a bit more as the underscore requires less work. "Kl1mat Ch4nge"(R)(C) "_____" 2022
  • As a species, we blew our opportunity to mitigate this. Adaptation and geo-engineering will be the options.

    Scientists and engineers need to be thinking about geoengineering strategies. We’re going to need them.
    • ...and moving thousands of major cities further in land to higher ground. Oh, & set up safety perimeters around the abandoned old cities while their buildings collapse into the sea. Oh, & don't forget about accommodating rapidly increasing numbers of internally displaced climate refugees. How does Bill Gates propose we deal with them?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Scientists and engineers need to be thinking about geoengineering strategies. We’re going to need them.

      Sorry, not doable. The human race cannot do things at this scale. We are going to see the full catastrophe, we can only try to make some fragment of civilization survive it.

      • You couldnt be more wrong. The whole global warming thing is happening BECAUSE we’ve done things at a planetary scale. Without even thinking about it.

        Planet-scale action will be necessary. If not this century, then probably the next, and certainly by the one after.scientist and engineers need to be thinking about this stuff NOW, so when we put plans in place we can minimize the chance of things going all Snowpiercer.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          You couldnt be more wrong. The whole global warming thing is happening BECAUSE we’ve done things at a planetary scale. Without even thinking about it.

          Driven by greed and stupidity. Yes. That rather limits what can be done with it. It also took something like 2 centuries despite global enthusiastic participation. And it was not coordinated. Now is you think this can serve as precedent for a targeted, coordinated, global engineering venture that likely will make nobody filthy rich, then you are just utterly dumb.

          Planet-scale action will be necessary. If not this century, then probably the next, and certainly by the one after.scientist and engineers need to be thinking about this stuff NOW, so when we put plans in place we can minimize the chance of things going all Snowpiercer.

          Again, not doable. This is several orders of magnitude too large. The only reason some people are talking about this is propaganda that serves to

          • The really large catastrophe isn't quite inevitable yet. If I remember my reading correctly, we've locked in somewhere around 1.5-2.0 degrees of cooling. That'll be bad, but not civilization-ending. 4 degrees would drive us all towards the poles.

            In our current state, yes, you're right, planet-scale engineering is off the table, because our species has a serious case of head-up-ass-itis. My hypothesis: a wide band of uninhabitable area around the equator of the planet is likely to focus people's minds ju

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by gweihir ( 88907 )

              The really large catastrophe isn't quite inevitable yet. If I remember my reading correctly, we've locked in somewhere around 1.5-2.0 degrees of cooling. That'll be bad, but not civilization-ending. 4 degrees would drive us all towards the poles.

              Well, maybe. We may have 2.5C locked in already and the way things are going we are not going to see decisive, concerted action anytime soon. So 4C or even 5C is a real possibility. That would be exceptionally bad. I do agree it is not inevitable, but if you factor in human nature and that many assholes are _still_ trying to get rich (or usually "richer") on climate-destructon, it does not look good.

              In our current state, yes, you're right, planet-scale engineering is off the table, because our species has a serious case of head-up-ass-itis. My hypothesis: a wide band of uninhabitable area around the equator of the planet is likely to focus people's minds just a tad. A few hundred nuclear plants driving carbon capture isn't beyond our species capabilities. Run them for a century, and we can probably take as much carbon out of the atmosphere as we need. But we're not going to do it until ecological collapse hits us in the head with a brick.

              Well, nuclear will not do it. Too many problems. Maybe fusion. Solar and wind are options as carbon capture d

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